Day the twenty-fifth

Today the prompt is to be inspired by a given poem. I took the words "in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed".

Last days

In every room in this abandoned house
There lives a memory, subsisting on dust
And echoes, and wearing just
A shawl across weary shoulders
That have borne a life of rainstorm and trial.

Silent footsteps pave across the floor and
Their tread is imagined in every sheet of paper
Tossed untidily aside when the last
Living residents left so precipitously,
And a single glove sits
Upon a chair and offers a mute lament for its
Long lost companion.

                                    The sleepless years
Of waiting can never ease the death
And destruction of mankind in its last days
And the pain never rests on couch or bed.

Day the nineteenth

Today the prompt is basically found trivia.

 The hallway

The hallway was a neglected room,
Although not really a room at all,
More an intermission between the more
Definite movements of the living room,
The kitchen, or the bedroom.
No one usually sits and reads in the hallway,
No one goes there in order to listen to
A programme on the radiogram.
No, the hallway is a transitory place,
In the house, but not entirely of the house,
On the way from here to there, from
Downstairs to upstairs, from day to night.
In the hallway live the coats between outings,
The hats that are used only now and then,
The gloves that are not even in pairs any more,
And the umbrellas await the grabbing hand
When someone sees rain as they open the door.
On the chest in the hallway live the keys
Deposited as a resident passes from 'the world'
Into 'the home', a symbolic waiting area to
Pass from life through to death.
The hallway is purgatory with an ill-defined
Purpose, it is neither heaven nor hell, but
An ante-chamber to either, or a point of
Last return, from here you may go back
Or you may choose to go on but you cannot stay.
In this the universal hallway.

Day the sixth

Today the prompt is to write in the persona of a character featured on Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

An elephant opines


Stately as I am, no rain
nor snow diverts me
from my course.

My dignity survives even
man's determination
to use me as a horse.